Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Triumph mods

It's taken me a while to get around to putting this stuff up here. This work was actually done almost two months ago now. To give some brief sort of a background — I have always loved old bikes, specifically 'cafe racers' of the late 50s and 60s. I like British bikes, and a couple of years ago I bought my first one. A Norton Commando 850 MkII. I loved this bike. I still kinda do. BUT, I was wanting to ride more, and ride longer, than a 36 year old motorcycle was really willing to, and so I was spending much more time and money on constantly fixing the thing than was conducive to actually riding... many a sunny weekend passed with me either trying to fix it, or looking forlornly at it sitting there before heading off in the van to do something. SO... I bought this. It's a 2008 Triumph Thruxton. My intention being to slowly pull off all the ugly modern looking bits and replace them with bits from old bikes. What you see here (post below) is my first real attempt to do this. You need to see an original Thruxton to see how bad the original back-end looks, but trust me it's pretty shit.

I did this with the help of Malcolm and Shane, see Malcolm below with the bike once we got the hideous stock rear fender off. I have some nice shots of Shane rewiring it too, will post those later.